The Continence of the Cold-Footed
I married a remarkable woman. She hails from a family of square-jawed, resolute people, with one side orbiting a demanding matriarch and the other full of physically imposing, competitive souls. The influence of her two grandmothers is obvious: one raised four daughters, each of them different in their own way but all highly educated, opinionated and staunch. The other raised seven children and now, in her mid-90s, is still giving her kids fits as she tromps up and down the Cascades, unimpeded by age or any sense of self-limitation. Irrepressibility and stubborn insistence flow through both sides of the family, and dedication to education and self-improvement are paramount within the clans.
The bar was set high for my wife, but since the time I’ve known her — and, I’ve come to learn, since she was old enough to speak — she’s been exceeding everyone’s expectations but her own. One aunt became a US Circuit Court Chief Justice, her father had a remarkable collegiate football career and an uncle has become a Bishop of the Methodist Church. Expectations of personal achievement are inherent among her brood.
When we met, we were vastly different people to who we’ve become together. I watched her brim with enthusiasm for adventure, her blue eyes brighten with un-channeled energy for exploration and in a prescient moment early on I told her I’d turn her into a mountain girl. Though self-reliance was part of her upbringing, my wife wasn’t exposed to the outdoors from birth as I was — and had become a city version of herself as a result. In retrospect, it seems few in her family of dozens found interest in solitude with so many obligations and dramas in which to participate, and that left her the outlier amongst them.
Our first camping trip together, we survived the coldest night in a decade in Death Valley. She was terribly underequipped and myself just less so, but we cuddled together for warmth on a rare freezing night, and once thawed from the desert sun in the morning, laughed about it and made plans to gear up, if there was to be a second tent trip in our mutual future.
Thankfully there have been many, and since that time, we’ve expanded our tracks together across our continent and a couple of others too. We’ve backpacked up and over the Continental Divide, stood side-by-side trading casts in headwaters creeks, outrun terrifying Utah monsoons, sheltered from high-mountain lightning under massive riverside pines, summited peaks and outrun our competition in countless races.
In a scant decade, she’s surfed, learned to ski two ways, caught pike and muskellunge and hundreds of trout on a fly rod, acquired a memorable scar mountain biking, learned to rock crawl a truck through Canyonlands boulder fields, shot an AR-15, left-crossed a Kenyan monkey, pulled a rowdy peloton on her road bike, podiumed in a brutal winter quadrathlon, won sand dune pushup contests and chugged pilsners liter for liter with hard partying friends at Oktoberfests. She looks fantastic in flannel, dirty boots and a beat-up cap. She insists on driving a car with a manual transmission, and irks her retired Marine athletic trainer for never quitting, then never ending up sore the next day. And she’s all mine.
Each day, she’s busy running a pediatric cardiology practice, not only overseeing the chaos of the staff and challenging patient base but also performing a hundred or more annual interventional catheterization procedures — meaning she fixes kids’ hearts from the inside out. Among all that, she’s found time, energy and focus in the last two years to pursue and achieve a Masters’ degree — bringing her total post-secondary education to a scarcely-believable 16 years. Coping well with early-onset senioritis during her Masters’ program, she told me a few months from the end that she’d be needing an unplugging break after graduation and I eagerly agreed. She tends not to pick boring adventures to tackle, so I told her I’d camp-counsel her anywhere she wanted to go, into anything she wanted to do. She snapped out an answer with the assurance of a person who’s concrete in their sentiment: “I want to backpack the Wind Rivers,” was all she said.
So, the Winds it was, and she planned a route that had us walk a 30-odd mile loop through the south-central Winds, and then she left the rest of the trip’s plan to me. We loaded our Land Cruiser with several cubic meters of camping, fishing and backpacking gear, then drove north, prioritizing the Long Way: two-lane highways and forest roads whenever possible. Our malleability as a couple has been a hallmark of ours, we’ve changed plans on a dime dozens of times together, we’ve bailed like gentle fair-weathers when it’s suited us and have come to view this quality as a highly positive one. Despite the stressful places we’ve been and feelings of being in too deep from time to time, we’re yet to fight. Not once yet.
After a couple day’s drive from home and a diversion to a sordid, hilarious party on some dear friends’ ranch outside Ft. Collins, we pointed north again and made for more wide-open space, seeking out dirt roads and the green parts of the map. Our first full day of travel in Wyoming, we noticed the leading edge of a horizon-wide front gathering itself, and within 50 miles of camp our windshield wipers were whipping like Catholic flagellants, shedding road spray, snow and hail, and in an instant, our plan began to change.
A quick consultation with the weather forecast dimmed our prospects: non-stop rain and cold, even down into the river bottoms. In the best of times, backpacking is arduous, particularly for those of us who prefer the comfort of canned beer at trails’ end — but backpacking into wilderness, tickling the feet of the continental divide in an early season snowstorm is masochism. We made the quick decision to invert our plans, delaying the backpack part of the trip in hopes of better weather, and so we aimed our sights further west and south, toward the Wyoming Range, where we hoped to fish and explore at a slow pace, unplugged and unhurried. We sought out a pretty valley containing Labarge Creek and in one afternoon drove it’s length to the headwaters, then over a narrow pass and down from the adjacent headwaters of Grey’s River the we went.
4x4 camping has its benefits, and several of them became immediately clear as we started the climb out of the sagebrush expanse and up the narrowing Labarge valley: the leading edge of what would turn out to be a 10-day cold front had saturated our dirt road, and within two miles of leaving pavement our truck was satisfyingly coated in puddle grit and mud. On came the seat heaters, into low range slipped the transfer case and we plowed up-valley, cascades of muddy water washing over the hood with each passing puddle.
As we drove up the Creek, we crossed into rangeland and were greeted by a herd of cattle being pushed down-valley. Two cowpeople — one man, one woman, both in long slickers, kerchiefs and hats — whistled and hollered at their herding dogs and the dogs snapped and chased in excitement. We climbed higher in the valley, and I began to argue with myself, justifying the need to inspect the stream with the end of my fly line. I had spent hours poring over maps and satellite imagery of the Grey’s, and it came as a bit of a shock to me to learn that the Creek we were driving directly up had been the focus of an intensive habitat and native fish restoration project — but for all its fishiness, we had places to go, a panoply of spots to inspect just over the divide. The mud and potholes continued, and our diesel kept calmly chugging along until we reached a low gap between the mountains. Passing through the gap felt a little ominous and irreversible as the snow and rain picked up — “Watch Me Grow” said the sign at the headwaters of the tiny Grey’s, and grow it did. In the temporal uncertainty of a dark storm, where any sense of the lateness of the day was obscured by grey and rain, we prioritized getting stopped and setting up camp for the night. A few hundred miles of stress and road fatigue caught us out, and I found myself lagging around camp, our kit not quite well sorted this early in the trip.
I was offered a bargain: “You go fish,” she said, “and I’ll manage the fire.” In record time I was out of my personal fog, geared up and walking downstream, impressed by the cold air and the view off down the valley toward the suddenly snow-covered peaks of the Wyomings. I stepped into the frigid water and warmed my core with some rapid casts, but no sight of fish. A screech overhead and I looked up to see a large osprey snapping its wings at me, and it cocked its head as it examined me. I took the fishhawk’s presence as a harbinger of salmonid bounty to come, a good omen, and I said a grateful, quiet benediction and fished the short stretch back to camp. My fingers stiffened with the cold and the water shed by the fly line, my breath condensed in front of me, and I took notice of the smell of cedar smoke. It beckoned with the promise of comfort and warmth and safety borne aloft on the wind, and I reeled up, skunked but satisfied with the day’s exploration.
I warmed myself splitting a stump up into firewood and we sat, silent but for the crackling of the fire and the spit of rain on the coals, and we both felt the tension of society and the tedium of other people fade. With a hot dinner and good whiskey in our bellies, we turned in early and fell asleep to the sound of osprey chicks shrieking demanding their parents feed them.
When we woke, it was bleaker and greyer than when we slept. Hot oatmeal, strong coffee and several layers of wool later, we’d packed camp and headed downriver, looking for the fishy areas where water bends and slows. Miles downriver, the sun emerged for a spell and we found a gorgeous stretch of river where a wide-hipped riffle called to me, and we started to cast in earnest. Nothing much was happening but I tagged a flashy fish on a long cast, but it spit the hook and I was left lamenting. The weather closed back up and our riffle ran out so back downriver we drove, until we found a perfect cut-bank and a flat spot with a fire ring. The river’s gradient and flow picked up so we tangled with an angrier stream, plunged over slippery rocks and found a foamy seam holding an active fish and it wasn’t long before I’d landed my first Wyoming trout — an aggressive Snake River fine-spotted. Nothing so dorky and exciting as adding another species or strain to the life’s list.
Hours later and resigned to another boggy night, we lit a campfire close to the roar of the Grey’s in a hopeful-looking, flat and grassy camp. We ruminated on the inevitability of time and erosion — the steep cut bank of the river only a temporary, dissolving boundary to the channel. In the fading light, we noticed a geological survey marker cemented into the ground and wondered whether, if we returned a year hence, the marker would still exist. One more season’s runoff might well do that marker in, another finite spot in space-time made ephemeral by gravity, force and time. The rain picked up and we zipped ourselves into our tent, and soon were asleep to the persistent drumming on the tent’s shell.
They say the worst thing about camping is pissing at night, but it’s my experience that it cuts both ways. The same inconvenience and discomfort that result from exiting one’s down cocoon and rushing a sleep-drunk whiz in the mountain dark enacts an inward gravity, alters one’s threshold for retaining urine, distracts a frozen mind from the cold creeping through an overmatched sleeping bag. But like some deranged cousin to dopamine, there’s a chemical price to pay for holding in a bladder full, and my brain always negotiates with itself over whether to commit to the pain of wakefulness and cold to get relief. In theory though, retaining all that warm urine maintains a body’s core temperature; my personal hypothesis is that the colder the night, the more a full bladder encourages staying put.
The continence of the cold-footed saw me through the night, until after daybreak I was forced to face reality and climbed down off the truck to find the earth comprehensively soupy with a combination of mud and cow shit. Our hopeful, grassy camp spot had become just another mess of puddles and I added to it. It was above freezing, but only barely, and in the twilight I noticed our truck’s awning was sagging badly with collected rainfall. One ill-advised move later and one side of the awning collapsed, loudly snapping the aluminum arm in two and as the truck lurched with the sudden shift in weight, I cursed my tendency to act before thinking. My mood darkened and I climbed back to the warmth of the tent, angry at myself and annoyed at the weather. Cold morning rain is nature’s snooze button and we slept quite late waiting for a reduction in its intensity, but for naught. Confronted with a new impediment to our comfort in crap weather, we consulted the map and decided to the take the easy way out: drive out of the woods and into Jackson, a place we’d both been keen to avoid at the outset of the trip, purely for want of solitude and a lack of people. The fishing hadn’t been spectacular and we’d blown through a good portion of the State which I’d wanted to explore, but the weather was sending signals we’d be foolish to ignore.
Hours later we rolled into town, the truck so filthy with splattered mud that changing lanes was a hazard, so we found a carwash and I rinsed the truck as best I could while Jenn tracked down a hotel for the night. We found a pleasant place and soon were laboriously, luxuriantly steam-cleaning ourselves and thawing the sodden cold out of our bones. Cold beer, dry fleece and hearty meals commenced and we both reveled in an unexpected dose of civilization.
Among our amusements was the people-watching in Jackson and we identified them like rigorous birdwatchers. Europeans in technical fabrics and stout hiking gear; Asians skillfully wielding umbrellas; pretend, city cowboys insistent on wearing their freshly-procured Stetsons indoors; and Texan women wearing diamond rings big and bright as miner’s lamps, their hair adhesives a public fire hazard if sat too close to flame. I found myself hoping vainly that we’d just be overlooked, my plaid shirt and blaze orange beanie blending seamlessly, seasonally, like foliage. Perhaps I’m just as much a tourist as the foreigners obliviously jaywalking, but if forced to prove my bona fides, at least I can split wood, huff a campfire into life and gut a trout.
Our next day was shaping up to be unencumbered but inescapably weather-affected, so we hatched a plan to explore our way toward the Winds, nose around a stretch the Green River on foot, make the most of it. We bundled up and walked quietly back to our hotel with the world muted but for the soft hissing of the rain on the pavement, grateful for one another and the flexibility of those who lack an agenda.
Yet to see moose on our trip, we were both on high alert the next morning as we drove away from town and up the imposing Snake River canyon. We drove up the Hoback where sun threatened to shine periodically, then forded a serious squall as we climbed to the edge of the vast Wind River valley. Funny how low clouds obscure so much of a place, focusing one’s attention myopically on the immediately nearby. As the clouds changed, we caught glimpses of the dominant peaks in the distance and we jokingly wondered what the top two-thirds of the landscape looked like in these parts. The terrain opened up considerably and soon we were at the Green, so turned up a BLM road and aimed for the most serpentine stretch of river we could find. Finally the clouds thinned a bit and as we geared up to fish we thought to apply sunscreen — a welcome change of pace.
Every day dawns a new puzzle when fishing, and knowing next to nothing about the Green I found myself a little bamboozled as I tried to figure out the approach. Broad, flat and deceptively deep, we had found a stretch of river that was relatively featureless, and the light was doing us no favors — all the underwater structure was rendered obscure, and when the wind whipped up the patterns it chopped onto the surface disoriented us. But still, it was a beautiful place, wide open and classically western in a way that I’ve only occasionally explored. We walked upstream, stopping to wade out as far as we dared, and the fishing was decidedly difficult. Still, I managed to catch a single fish and all was not lost, but the persistent drip from the tip of my numbed nose and the wind’s chill through my layers signaled the need to stop the self-abuse, to save our energy and give up for the day. That night, we made Pinedale and found a warm brewery with more cold beer and I fell asleep excited to drift boat fish the next two days.
We linked up with our guide the next morning and shortly were driving out of town and through the vast sagebrush countryside. We discussed tactics, settled on streamers due to the recent cold and within 20 minutes of getting on the river, I had my first brown to the boat — a good omen. We all quickly established a good rapport, and each of us fell into an easy rhythm of conversation, learning about one another in the way guides and clients do: fish stories, jokes and the necessity of conversational babble that comes with being stuck on a small boat with strangers for an entire day.
Having hired dozens of guides now, I know the routine and certainly have my own. I’ve learned it’s critical to speak personally with a guide ahead of time, politely set expectations, be honest about our skills but also listen to my gut. As paying customers go, I’m aware that we’re the enjoyable ones — skilled, enthusiastic and fun — but sometimes the personalities don’t mix. We really lucked out this time around, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Eric Oram at Two Rivers Emporium for his efforts, knowledge and humor. We’ve established a handful of genuine friendships with guides over time, and he’s one of the people who we’ve connected with. It’s fun to correlate these guys so closely with a place and an experience too — Aaron Ford is synonymous with the South Island of New Zealand for us, Lindsey Channel with the Missouri in Montana, Brad Bohen with Musky Country in Wisconsin and now Eric and the Green.
With a couple of early fish boated, I lost myself in the rhythm of fishing from the boat. Drifting and spinning downstream, hearing the snap of my line and splash of the fly, my mind flowed passively along the conveyor belt of scenery, wide open and serene. Out of nowhere and breaking the silence, Eric pointedly piped up, “There’s a moose, right in front of your face!” and not fifty feet from us we noticed a yearling moose standing there, unimpressed with us. And the feeling was mutual — given their reputation for stature and grandiosity, Jenn’s first wild moose spotted was comically diminutive. Undaunted and buoyed by the moose encounter, we went on catching increasingly larger fish, Jenn with one particularly nice rainbow and a couple of large browns for me, including one classic hook-jawed spawner.
We had a great surprise rounding one bend too, when we spotted a hulking bull Moose guarding his two females in the bush. We anchored the boat and sat there watching the trio of them, amazed that they all didn’t bolt as soon as we’d got stopped. Eventually we let them be but shortly thereafter we drifted up onto a large female and her calf, running Jenn’s lifetime total to six Moose, all in one day. As we pulled off the river a few hours later, hands cramped and backs stiff, we recounted the day’s tally of wildlife: the six Moose, numerous deer, a flock of Sandhill Cranes, one juvenile Bald Eagle walking along the ground, several more aloft, and of course, all the fish we’d fooled and pulled face-ward to the boat. A few miles on down the road, out in the vast sagebrush and nowhere near water, Eric remarked again, “Look at that Moose!” and another mighty bull rose up from his spot in the sun to watch us drive by. Make that seven, lifetime.
The next morning dawned meaner, under a grim grey sky, frozen slush covering all the town’s cars, and a blinking road sign antagonizing us by reading 34°. Hopping into Eric’s truck I took notice of the full-blast heater and we all acknowledged our reality head-on: we were in for a cold, hard day. Our fears proved true too, as all day long we battled squalls of persistent cold rain, whipping wind and low clouds. Not more than an hour into the day, my hands were numb and stinging, growing more useless by the minute as they’d begun to cramp into frozen fisherman’s claws. Mercifully, Eric was able to reach his shuttle driver and arrange to have him meet us stream-side to loan me a set of gloves, and when we touched the bank, I got a glimpse of my clearly bearing-it wife, sans grin. Despite the cold we’d had some fish to hand, but it was turning into the kind of day that makes a person regret their compulsions, question their choices and, in my case, feel a guilty sense of responsibility for how cold and miserable my wife was.
We stopped in a couple places to walk around warming up and concentrate our casts on some longer riffles — and as I looked downriver to see Jenn casting I felt a possessive, warm feeling of pride in her. That she’d be out there in such misery, gamely sticking it out and suffering in silence made me feel like a very lucky man indeed. Her persistence and resolution paid off and she landed one of the fish of the trip, a fat cutthroat that had the three of us whooping in excitement. I saw the smile on her face as she took in the beauty of its colors and its condition, and smiled myself realizing that she’d forgotten how poor the conditions were — she was back to genuinely enjoying herself.
We carried on, the weather alternately teasing us and punishing us, and we all battled a bit. Fish came and went, miles slid by and above all, we endured. On one long cast, I annoyed myself by plugging my articulated streamer solidly into a log stuck to the bank, and expecting to snap off my tackle, was surprised when what turned out to be a heavy fencepost came loose and I was able to reel it in. And thus was born the legend of the Pine Trout, king of the Wyoming waters. I know myself well enough to know that this legend will be with me the rest of my life, expanding and evolving. Unlike most tall fish tales, this one comes with a tangible, defensible punchline.
Into the Winds
Checking the night sky before sleeping that night, I saw the clouds thinning into nothingness, a harbinger of a fine, clear morning to come. We’d had a week straight of unexpected cold, freezing mud and eleven varieties of precipitation, and I went to bed hopeful but disposed with mild cynicism for a few more hypothermic days. We both woke early to a bright blue sky, the sun burning low and yellow at dawn.
At the trailhead we grunted happily as we lifted our packs for the first time — same as it ever was, the enthusiasm for the trip girding collarbones, hips and feet for the pounding to come. We bid Bunny adieu and stepped brightly onto the trail, immediately into an aspen grove. Within a mile we passed a single outfitter and his pack train, headed out for a resupply. Just after, we got our first look back out to the plains from a heightened perspective — the length of the lake seemed vastly more from our viewpoint, and with our first true bluebird day of the trip unfolding in front of us, we looked to the north and east to see the full range of the Winds clearly.
Two miles in and we started to walk in snow, but the day was bright and warming nicely and neither of us thought much of it. Three miles in and we ran into a pair of women headed down the mountain, and we learned they’d spent the last three days and nights braving the storm, the cold rain and snow while we’d been holed up avoiding it. We heard tell of enough snow up high in the basin that it’d caused them a navigational disagreement. Laudably, they decided if they disagreed about directions in the snow, the wise move was to retreat.
We took a break at Glimpse Lake, in an obvious campsite rendered discrete by snowfall — ominously discrete, it’d turn out, as from that moment until passing the same lake in the reverse direction days later, we’d be walking on snow. We went on another several miles to the spot we’d reckoned looked camp-able, perched between two lakes and with the high peaks of the divide visible through the trees. Despite the early hour, the morning sun had been screened in by high clouds, stopping any snowmelt and freezing the slush and mud. Cold feet set in for me as we finished up our hike — with sections shin-deep, my boots had soaked through and I realized I was in for a cold night. We did our best to tramp down the snow around our site, wearing quick paths between our tent, the fire and our bear-conscious cooking area, then set out to explore the lakes’ edges for aquatic amusement. A fortuitous break in the clouds warmed us up and revealed the scenery in vivid detail, but alas, not a fish to be seen.
We tromped back to our camp and soon we’d huffed and puffed a respectable fire. That night, lying awake listening to the silence of the forest, I curled myself into a compact ball to keep warm and lay awake for what felt like half the night regretting my choice to leave my 0-degree bag at home. Despite my layers, I got thoroughly cold, so much so that for the first time in our relationship, my wife cuddled me to keep me warm.
We slept late in the morning, me plowed as far under her as I could manage. After a mercifully sunny breakfast and a visit from a brave, gregarious chipmunk, we settled on a change of plans: follow an unbroken trail a scant mile to our next planned campsite. We broke camp then ascended the valley, following our footsteps from the previous day’s fishing, then soon were into fresh snow and a very uncertain trail. After half a mile of searching, we made the decision to backtrack to the main trail, then go the long way ‘round — stretching our hike through the snow from one mile to six. In retrospect, this was probably the most stressful moment of the trip for both of us, but we, like the women we’d encountered the day before, made a smart choice — though at the expense of our legs and my slushy, soaked feet.
On up the trail we kept post-holing, our confidence in the trail waxing and waning as we climbed and the snow deepened. Relieved to see a trail sign, we noted the junction and I spied a single trout cruising the flats near shore, which brightened my spirits. We make the final climb up to Heart Lake and surprised ourselves by finding a gorgeous sunny campsite with some sun-dried boulders. We set up camp and went off to fish the inlet of the lake my feet now merely wet instead of frozen and wet. With more structure in the lake we felt hopeful of fish and on my third cast to the shelf just below the gently flowing inlet, a flash of interest honed my focus. One more cast further out and a solid strike to my streamer, and then I reeled up a healthy cutthroat and asked a questioning “Dinner?”
Jenn smiled at me and I handed off my rod so she could try her luck, said a quick thank-you to the fish for the fight and the food, then dispatched it with a quick slice through the spine. I’m not keen on killing fish but recognize the responsibility to do so efficiently and without cruelty — I tossed the head and guts onto the bright snow of the bank. Conscious of the smell, I sincerely hoped some other critter would eat because of this — though I hoped I hadn’t just left an amuse bouche for a bear who’d follow his nose to our campsite. I thought wryly that I could not satisfy my demanding and disapproving mother; she gets exasperated and animated telling me why I’m wasting my time by releasing fish. “This one’s for you, ma,” I muttered.
A couple years back, when we first fly-fished for musky, our guide wisely told my wife to visualize what she wanted for her day, and she surprised us both by quickly replying “I want to catch my dinner today.” Whether skill, dumb luck, self-fulfilling prophecy or divine provenance, she boated a perfectly dinner-sized Pike that day and savored its filets (fried in bacon fat) and a few Leinenkugel’s under a Northwoods pine canopy as we watched the sun set over the Flambeau River. That day’s stuck in my mind ever since, and I’ve begun to practice a little visualization as a result. Combined with my audible benedictions to the places I fish, being outwardly grateful has become part of my regimen — feels to me like the way to be present, accounted for and connected to what I’m intending to do. Like my friend Sam who consciously interacts with a locked gate in a novel way on his walk to and from work each day, I’ve tried to be fully present and engaged in my angling, overcoming the sheepish feelings of silliness and futility and pointlessness incurred by saying a prayer to a fish.
When she decided on the Winds as a backpack destination, Jenn told me she was skittish about Grizzlies but trusting of me to get her through it safely. She’s such a capable person that I never consider having to provide for her, but as we ate the trout fresh from the coals, I felt a mild surge of my ego — our trip had been tougher than expected given the snow, and eating hot protein which I’d caught, killed, cleaned and cooked felt mighty nice. Taking care to contain all the smell we could, we bundled up the skin and bones of the fish and ziploc’d it into our bio bag, then laid in the tent for a while. The next day we’d attempt to reach the top of the plateau, which lay above us in yet more snow. I strategized about layers, doubled up on wool bottoms, tripled up on wool tops and wiggled my way into a self-wrapped burrito.
First light came the next morning before I was shivering too hard for comfort, and we were greeted with another bluebird day. We warmed in the sun as we packed and soon enough were underway, back down the trail we’d climbed the day before. Descending down the draw toward the lake we’d turn at, I spotted cruising fish — the first we’d actually seen out and about, despite our evening meal. Knowing me very, very well, my wife turned to me and said, “Later. We’ve got places to go.”
On up toward the top of the bench lands we hiked, following the half-melted footsteps of the couple we’d seen, in and out of the trees and around enormous rock formations. It felt weird and spooky to me for a few minutes as we climbed through a narrow slot in the trail, but I held my tongue so as not to panic Jenn unnecessarily. Maybe it was nothing at all, but some deep part of my brain was engaged in that moment and effusing a dilute mixture of flight chemicals — and looking back on it, I find it perfectly reasonable to think a lion or a bear had been somewhere in our proximity, watching us with disdain. Regardless, my silent panic abated and as we tromped higher up the plateau, the high peaks of the divide started to come into view. Eventually the tracks in the snow ran out and fortunately we could see the groove of the trail snaking off into the distance, so I offered to break trail, resolving to slow my roll to accommodate my wife’s shorter stride.
When we reached tree-line, the view became surreal — neither of us had figured on glacier travel on the trip, but it certainly was reminiscent up there. The plateau was glaringly white, the type of bright that makes a person very aware of the undersides of their cheeks and eyelids and all the other places the sun doesn’t normally shine, but it was stunning. In the distance we could see a trail sign and a slight glimpse of the lake, so we continued the post-holing until the whole lake was in view, its shores vivid and blue between the brilliant snow and massive lump of a mountain above it. The thin air and weariness and possibly dehydration combined to cause an intoxicating dizziness, and I just stood there, soaking in the view until it occurred to me just how cold and wet my feet were. I nominated a dry rock along the shore of the lake and we plodded towards it, and as we did I spied a cruising fish, which perked me up considerably. We sat down and took off our frozen boots, grateful for the high sun, and soon enough steam was rising from my sodden socks.
Jenn was remarkably quiet, looking around with a look of awe and satisfaction and reverence on her face and as I reached out to touch her back she started talking about a long-held vision in her imagination.
“I’ve wanted to come here since I was eight years old reading about this place in my Encyclopedia Britannica,” she said matter-of-factly.
“The Wind Rivers?”
“No. Here. This lake, underneath this mountain.”
I was taken aback, surprised at the specificity of her statement. She went on to explain that ever since she read of the Winds, she had had it fixed in her mind as someplace she had to see, and in particular it was Summit Lake and the view up toward Mt. Oeneis. I found myself a little astonished at that, and a whole swirl of emotions and ideas came over me.
Among the most remarkable aspects of her personality is her perseverance. She swears she knew from age three that she wanted to be a doctor — what a revelation that would be for me, today, to know what my purpose is meant to be, let alone to have known it intrinsically since childhood. Despite growing up in a family that valued education, she faced numerous obstacles to achieving her vision, including a pessimistic grade school teacher who implored her to set a more gender-appropriate goal — hairstylist perhaps. After navigating the gauntlet that is being female in America, with all its slights and creeps and hassles and universal discriminations, she attended and excelled in medical school, only to be told during her residency that she, again, should steer away from neurosurgery due to her gender. Despite that, she chose interventional pediatric cardiology as her path, the structural repair of congenital heart defects through catheters — in patients ranging from in-the-womb fetuses to the sickest-of-the-sick children to adults with low-functioning tickers. The tools, methods and techniques she skillfully uses to do her work are incredible — none to me moreso than the array of screens displaying two-dimensional fluoroscopy images of a beating, three-dimensional heart. She downplays the degree of difficulty by claiming it’s just a form of plumbing, the work she does, but the mental acuity required to extrapolate monochromatic, two-dimensional imagery into an actionable mental image of a malformed, three-dimensional heart boggles me.
More recently, in the last eight years, she’s persevered through a complicated transition from junior partner to medical director of her cardiology practice, enduring the low-grade daily ineptitude and dishonesty of a remote and disinterested corporate parent, the sexism and ageism and eruptions of anger from a series of retiring male physician partners, not to mention the sheer stress of practicing medicine in a resource-poor state, often with uneducated and passive patients. Her response to all of that was to seek further education, so typically she gained admission to several of the top programs of the kind, choosing to attend the top-ranked school. Insult was added to injury — but it became just another obstacle for her to overcome — when her corporate parent reneged on its offer to pay for her masters’ degree. Nevertheless, she persisted.
When she was done persisting, she set her sights on fulfilling a lifelong dream — in this case, to climb to the shore of Summit Lake in the Wind Rivers. Making it to this spot had taken a great deal of effort — first the commitment to go, then the logistics of doing so, then the physical effort, and even then, the stars had to align. Snow and cold had obscured the path, increased the degree of difficulty, and the possibility of encountering a Grizzly added an extra hurdle of risk and uncertainty.
For a city girl, what’s more daunting than the uncertainty of camping through Grizzly country? She’s the type to push her limits to defy the tepid, antiseptic reality of daily American life, but the vivid and all-too-tangible possibility of a bear encounter is real in the Greater Yellowstone area. Despite the hyperbole and maternal panic Grizzlies might inspire, they’re a risk to be respected, and we did our very best to be smart and safe in our travels. When you believe as I do that the mountains belong the wildlife more than to us humans, it colors your judgement to some degree, shapes your behavior, engenders a sober personal responsibility — all of which adds up to a challenge worth meeting.
I’m proud of my wife for facing up to all of it: a lifetime of back-of-mind dreaming and preparation and planning, the physicality of the hike, the conditions, the fauna, the last-minute juggling of plans to suit our ever-changing reality. The symbolism of the moment wasn’t lost on me, sat flabbergasted on that rock, of my wife reaching one summit, immediately setting her sights on the next one, and dispatching that goal with certainty and determination.
I felt a sense of pride myself too, marinating in the love and affection she showed me. With a lot more years of outdoor experience and many more wilderness miles under my feet than her, I feel pretty capable and calm in the woods — and I’ve become a pretty capable camp counselor. Just so happens I have an enthusiastic and very game camper on my hands. What fortune for me.
We sat there a good long while, leaning on one another and letting the mountain and the sky do all the talking, and in time the rings of sipping fish far out in the unreachable middle of the lake awakened my compulsion. Numb feet crammed back into saturated boots, I walked curiously to the inlet of the lake and cast a few times for a cruising trout, but spooked it out to deeper waters. As I inspected the convoluted inlet, I realized the mistake I’d made — right where the two foot-wide stream emptied into the lake, it had carved out a bowl with clear paths entering it from different directions. How oddly perfect a little, one-trout hole that spot was — I marveled at the structure, simplicity and beauty of the tiny riverbank, overhanging grasses, and clear highways in the corner. Even these weeks later I can envision all the little elements that made up that right-sized trout nirvana; it was as if the cutthroat living in that lake were a Little Prince all to itself, living on an aquatic asteroid all its own.
We hoofed back down the trail and eventually passed below the snowline, our feet grateful for dry steps on pine needles and dirt rather than derivatives of yet more slush. Confused a time or two by the myriad lakes we were now seeing in reverse, we emerged from the pine to the shore of a gorgeous lake with a sandy, straight beach on it. Our prospects brightened as we sniffed out a perfect, flat camp, nestled among dry boulders and with several outcroppings of stone perched above the lake. We gratefully made a dry camp and I re-animated my feet and legs with some sprightly rock-hopping, my mood soaring from the day’s adventure. We cooked dinner and the wind noticeably died down, and soon I found myself staring at a fantasy writ in sipping fish. Hundreds and hundreds of them slurped bugs from the surface film of the lake and it sounded like gently popping bubbles from horizon to horizon. My compulsion worn to a dull nub by the rigor of the day, I soaked in the calm of the scene and after darkness fell we both pacified ourselves by the heat of our campfire and the spreading warmth of good bourbon.
Our last morning dawned thin, grey and cold, and any impulse we’d had to dawdle was pierced by the evidence in the sky of an approaching front. We packed our gear for the last time and stiffly tottered out of camp, and a light drizzle accompanied us most of the way back to the trailhead. We passed by lakes and streams, tarns and puddles and waterfalls, so many of them now awake with rising fish in a way that they hadn’t been in lower barometric conditions. I found myself relaxed and not thinking about griz, noticed the longer silences between bursts of chatter, the nervousness rounded off the edges of our play-by-play commentary.
“That’s a good-looking pond,” I said with continued genuine enthusiasm, despite the dozens of similar bodies of water we’d passed.
“A pond? How do you know to tell a pond from a tarn?”
Spying my opportunity, I pounced, thankful for the sweet naivety my wife displayed.
“Well, it’s pretty clear to me. If, when you see some new water you exclaim, ‘What in tarnation?!?’, it’s a tarn. Otherwise, it’s a pond.”
The laughter from my wife reverberated back to me, the uncontrollable, from-the-guts kind, and it didn’t stop for a while, from either of us. Smug and self-satisfied, I admitted to her I’d been noodling the concept of tarnation since we’d first walked out into the woods and had lucked into a softball of a question from her. But as they say, luck is just the intersection of skill and preparation, and I was deeply pleased with myself for landing that particular punchline.
A mile later, we reached a spot called the Crow’s Nest where we could see down to the shores of Fremont Lake and also up the vertical depths of the Pine River canyon; dozens of miles away there was a column of sunshine but closer to us the view was a gorgeous, misty and obscured one. It felt fitting to look down the lake knowing the wilderness was behind us and all the challenges we’d faced along with them. It’s just camping, sure, but backpacking always feels more fulfilling, a material accomplishment whose story is told in blisters and moleskin, ember burns in fleece, stubble and splinters and sunburns and skinned knuckles.
We’d timed our trip perfectly to maximize three days of bluebird skies and an hour later when we caught sight of our truck, we both breathed a sigh of relief knowing that mechanical transportation, heated seats and a hot hotel shower were at the end of our rainbow. En route to our hotel, we made a point to sample the novelty of the drive-thru liquor store, Bunny’s basso profundo idle rousing the clerk and requiring an indelicate shouted order. Thus fortified, we like chickens crossed the road and soon enough, I was sitting naked, heater blaring, 10% beer sliding down my gullet and lubricating my attitude. We showered and walked the scant few blocks of Pinedale to a pub, reveling in clean hands, ample beer and piping hot burgers. As we sat, minds fuzzy from our collected efforts and the simple luxuries of life at the tail end of a mountain vacation, we chatted about our highs and lows, resolving on the spot to return to the Winds for further exploration to more distant corners of the range.
We’ve come to call it the Sickness, our mutual urge to conclude one challenge by kicking off a new adventure, and in our time together it’s applied to everything from quadrathlons to musky fishing, winter camp trips to mountain biking. Maybe it’s a fear of stasis, or a desire to live an experiential life, or maybe it’s some curse of restlessness… but I never want to stop living my life with this woman, my adventure partner, my mountain girl.
